Top products from r/Purism

I do agree they could and have tampered with shipping on things in the past (Countdown to Zero Day ); however, for the NSA (as an example) to target ordinary citizens seems a bit out of focus for what the NSA would want to use resources on. I'm not saying they would not (please excuse the double negative), it seems like a lot of effort for next to zero gain. They would want to target individuals of high interest for sure and have shown in the past to be very specific on how they target them. Again the above mentioned book details how specific the Stuxnet virus was to avoid it from activating on every logic controller or found. I feel the same would be true for certain agency's to target select individuals not an entire group.
Also, if this bothers you then how can you trust VPN encryption at this point? Who can say they have or have not broken that? How can you trust they haven't broken HTTPS encryption? We can "what if" this to death.
For myself, I'm really looking forward to this phone for the lack of a company tracking me. No more Google listening to everything I say within ear shot of my phone. No more Google tracking everywhere I've been all day Watch this.

The NSA cares about national security, you downloading that new album of MP3s with Bit torrent is a matter for other agencies. Why waste the resources?

With a Linux phone, you're free to configure a firewall to limit whatever you like, incoming or outgoing. You can't really do that on an iPhone or an Android phone, so PinePhone/Librem 5/etc all give you something you didn't have before: control. It's up to you who you trust and how much of the control you decide to use.

> I want to be in complete control of my internet connection.

So, you want complete control, but you don't want to spend time to take that control? If you don't want to do it all yourself, you're going to need to trust somebody, for example blacklists/whitelists from uMatrix and whatnot.

If you only use a handful of services, then you can always block everything by default and only allow the handful of services that you choose.

> Sure, block Google and Facebook, but that site you're visiting is collecting your data and selling it to a databroker, who in turn sells it to Google and Facebook.

You get to choose who you trust. Don't click on links that you don't trust. Don't buy internet service from companies you don't trust. And so on.

How hard it is really depends on who you trust. For me, pi-hole + uBlock Origin + Tor occasionally is "secure enough", but maybe you're more paranoid than that and for you completely disabling wifi and going through a USB/Lightning adapter for your phone is more your speed (YouTube video, Lightning Ethernet adapter on Amazon, USB-C Ethernet adapter on Amazon; note, all of these will track you).

That being said, the root of the problem is that companies will find a way to make money, and tracking you is the way many companies go about it if you're not willing to pay for a service directly (and in some cases, even if you're willing to pay). I think we need to support companies that do value your privacy so they'll win against the companies that don't. Purism is more trustworthy than most other electronics companies, so I think they're worth some attention.

Trust companies that earn it, block those that don't. I used to unblock Reddit ads until the redesign came out, and now I don't trust them.

Well if you were willing to part with either WiFi and bluetooth or the LTE chip and get compatible drivers, you could probably use something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Ableconn-M2-NW-107-Gigabit-Ethernet-Module/dp/B07599LZ5S

It would look absolutely bonkers but I would love to see the reactions when you plug in your phone via ethernet!

I don't mean those cheap styluses you can buy for a dollar or two, I mean Surface or Wacom Cintiq like stylus. Will lthey work?

If not, will we be able to swap the display for some other display that support one of those technologies? I think that surface 3 stylus is supported in Linux kernel we heave now. So, in my case using something like this https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Surface-Pen-Pro-Black/dp/B00VGKHPLK would be enough. But those "sucking cup styluses" are not good enough. I have used them and it's bad when compared with the surface or wacom cintiq pen.